arXiv:2604.00626cs.LGcs.CL2026-04综述被引 108

解决大模型蒸馏中错误累积问题,让小模型边生成边纠错。

A Survey of On-Policy Distillation for Large Language Models

  • 用学生实际输出反馈优化,避免单次模仿导致的误差放大。
  • 误差增长从平方级降为线性,显著提升长文本生成稳定性。
  • 适合关注模型压缩、推理优化与强化学习融合的研究者。

随着大语言模型能力与成本同步增长,将前沿能力迁移到更小、可部署的学生模型成为关键工程挑战,知识蒸馏仍是主流方法。现有工业流程中静态模仿教师生成文本存在结构性缺陷,尤其在长序列和高推理强度任务下愈发严重:学生训练时仅接触完美教师前缀,但推理时需自主生成,微小错误会持续累积,暴露偏差随序列长度平方增长。为此,基于策略蒸馏(On-Policy Distillation, OPD)重构训练循环,让教师对学生的实际输出提供反馈,目标是将累积项从平方级降至线性,将蒸馏重构为迭代修正过程。该领域已扩展至分歧设计、奖励引导优化与自对弈等方向,但贡献分散于知识蒸馏、RLHF与模仿学习社区,缺乏统一框架。本文首次系统综述,将OPD形式化为学生采样轨迹上的f-散度最小化,沿三个设计维度(优化目标、信号来源、训练稳定性)组织文献,整合成功条件、常见失败模式,并揭示其与KL约束强化学习的内在联系。最后提出开放问题,包括蒸馏缩放律、不确定性感知反馈、代理级蒸馏及蒸馏与强化学习日益紧密的交叉趋势。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

As Large Language Models continue to grow in both capability and cost, transferring frontier capabilities into smaller, deployable students has become an important engineering problem, and knowledge distillation remains a common technique for this transfer. The prevailing recipe in industrial pipelines, static imitation of teacher-generated text, carries a structural weakness that grows more severe as tasks become longer and more reasoning-intensive. Because the student is trained on flawless teacher prefixes but generates its own at inference, small errors tend to accumulate into trajectories it has rarely been trained to recover from, and the resulting exposure bias has been shown to scale roughly with the square of sequence length. On-Policy Distillation reorganizes the training loop around this observation by having the teacher provide feedback on what the student actually produces, with the goal of reducing the compounding term toward linear and reframing distillation as an iterative correction process rather than single-pass imitation. The resulting literature has expanded along divergence design, reward-guided optimization, and self-play, yet contributions remain scattered across the knowledge distillation, RLHF, and imitation learning communities without a unified treatment. This survey provides such a treatment. We formalize OPD as f-divergence minimization over student-sampled trajectories, organize the field along three design axes (what to optimize, where the signal comes from, and how to stabilize training in practice), and consolidate success conditions, recurring failure modes, and the connection between OPD and KL-constrained reinforcement learning. We close with open problems that emerge from this synthesis, including distillation scaling laws, uncertainty-aware feedback, agent-level distillation, and the growing overlap between knowledge distillation and RL.

知识蒸馏大模型压缩强化学习推理优化

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